Wednesday: The Day That Defies Math May 2, 2007
Posted by pointyhead in humor, life of a chogey, work sucks.trackback
It has become a part of the great American lexicon to refer to Wednesdays as “hump day”. I have always thought that doesn’t do the day justice. Sure, when you look at the cold, hard data, Wednesdays shouldn’t feel as good as they do.
Consider the math. Assume a typical chogey puts in 10 hours/day. When our hypothetical chogey wakes up on Wednesday (happy to have reached “hump day”), he has only worked 20 out of the 50 hours. Without further assumptions, the 3/5 of the week is remaining…more than half! Are marathon runners psyched to have ONLY 15.6 miles left to run? Do school children start getting ready for summer in the middle of February? Probably not…but herein lies the beauty of Wednesday: It defies all laws of mathematics…or does it. Let’s consider a few additional assumptions that may explain why Wednesday feels so good.
First, almost every bar in every city steps up their happy hour game on Wednesdays. While there’s no mathematical support for this, I submit that dollar draughts create a temporal distortion that actually makes the rest of the week shorter. Of course, this is only possible with proper buzz maintenance and hangover avoidance techniques. A hangover has been proven empirically to have a time-stretching effect that transports the chogey back to the Evil Treadmill—Tuesday. These are radical theories that will be explored further at a later time.
A more plausible (or at least mathematically supported) reason for Wednesday’s appeal is how the remaining 30 hours of “work” are spent. The graph below was created after gathering extensive data on how a typical chogey spends his/her week:
While the total number of hours per day remains constant, the distribution across standard chogey activities (e.g. work, personal emails, net browsing, and “spacing out”) varies over time.
According to the graph, there are only 6 hours of actual work remaining on Wednesday. The remaining time is largely spent making plans for the weekend, spamming friends with funny emails, blogging , and the ever popular “spacing out”. THIS (and the dollar draughts) explains the goodness of Wednesday.
Since I just survived another hump day, i must say that I enjoyed reading this blog, which i recently discovered. I particularly appreciated the thought of if work wasn’t work i’d be called Happy Fun Time.